455

Mules in Herodotus:
The Destiny of Half-Breeds
ABSTRACT: In his Histories, Herodotus uses the mule as a symbol of both
potential advantages and risks of intermarriage and reproduction between dif-
ferent ethnic groups. Both literal mules and the children of mixed marriages
are symbols of revolutions and new dynasties. These revolutions are often
marked by an attempt to blend or conglomerate distinct cultural nomoi, or
customs. Herodotus’ stories about ethnically mixed leaders and their effects
upon their societies serve as both encouragement and warning to governments
like Athens and the Persian Empire.

I. Introduction
In his Histories, Herodotus uses the mule as a symbol of both
potential advantages and the risks of intermarriage and reproduction
between different ethnic groups. Intermarriage itself is a primary fo-
cus of the Histories, as Herodotus makes clear in his initial mythical
prologue describing a series of transmarine abductions and subsequent
marriages of European and Asian women. 1 Attempted exogamous
unions, whether willing or unwilling, between two different ethnic
groups frequently lead to war in the Histories; any children of such
a relationship are always problematized. Herodotus uses the motif
of a mule to explore obliquely the issues raised by ethnic intermar-
riage and the discrimination against children of mixed marriages, the
human mules. His stories about ethnically mixed leaders and their
effects upon their societies serve as both encouragement and warning
to governments like the city-state of Athens and the Persian Empire.
Herodotus himself was an exile from Halicarnassus, a Persian-
controlled city-state on the western coast of Asia Minor with a mixed
population of Ionian Greeks and ethnically Anatolian Carians. 2 The
historian’s own ethnic heritage is unknown, although his primary
language was Greek. His cousin, the epic poet Panyassis, had a Car-
ian name, suggesting that Herodotus’ extended family, at the least,
was of mixed Greek and Carian descent. 3 He may thus have had a
particular sympathy for stories of ethnically mixed heroes and rulers.
The Histories themselves particularly focus on Athens, a city that
heavily discriminated against foreign-born residents, especially with
regard to marriage and citizenship. Athens also frequently emphasized

1
Hdt. 1.1–5. I am indebted to Suzanne Said for her advice and commentary.
The literature on Herodotus’ conception of the relationship between the Greeks and
Persians is vast. This paper has been particularly informed by F. Hartog, The Mirror
of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, tr. J. Lloyd
(Berkeley 1988) 61–111; R. Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and
the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge 2000) 75–101; and especially R. Vignolo Munson,
Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann
Arbor 2001) 248–50.
2
Hdt. 1.1; R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford 1988) 32.
3
Dion. Hal. De imit. Fr. 6.2.4; A. Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci (Leipzig 1987) 171.

455
456 A nise K. S trong
its supposedly autochthonous origins. 4 Herodotus contrasts the ho-
mogenous and democratic Athens with the more ethnically mixed but
autocratic Persian Empire.
Herodotus’ own personal relationship to Athens remains somewhat
unclear in the historical record, although the third-century b . c . histo-
rian Diyllus claims that he visited the city and received ten talents, a
large sum of money, from the state. 5 Parodies of the opening sections
of the Histories in some of Aristophanes’ comedies from 425 and 414
b . c . indicate that Herodotus’ work was well known in Athens by the
420s. 6 In other words, even if Herodotus did not himself reside in
Athens for any length of time or perform readings in Attica, he could
certainly expect that Athenians would have formed a significant part
of the ultimate audience of the Histories.
All of Herodotus’ potential listeners and readers, whether Athenian,
Ionian, or even possibly Persian, would have been extremely familiar
with the domesticated equines known as hemionoi, half-donkeys, or
mules. Mules would also have been a ubiquitous reminder of the pos-
sibilities of interbreeding in the ancient world. Mate a male donkey to
a mare and one produces a creature that is neither donkey nor horse
but a unique animal inheriting characteristics from both parents. In
the ancient tradition, mules are strong, stubborn, hardworking crea-
tures useful for both agriculture and war. Both Herodotus and other
ancient writers depict mules as lowly, efficient animals notable for
their inability to reproduce. 7
While Herodotus often mentions literal mules both as beasts of
burden and figures of prophecy, the image of the mule is also equated
with any child of mixed parentage. These half-breed characters, ranging
from the Persian King Cyrus to the Scythian King Scylas, invariably
have both great and surprising destinies. When successful, they rebel
against established dynasties and overthrow kingdoms, upsetting the
normal order of inheritance. In other cases, the mule-figures are killed
by enemies that seek to restore ethnic purity to society. Mules are
symbols of revolution and attempted change in the Histories; these
revolutions are often marked by an attempt to blend or conglomerate
distinct cultural nomoi, or customs.
At the same time, like the literal mule, half-breeds often have
trouble siring legitimate dynasties: Cyrus’ line dies out within two
generations and Scylas, a later mixed-blood Scythian king, is killed
by his own people. Through his use of mule imagery, Herodotus
suggests that both benefits and curses are involved in mixed-race
marriages and any resulting offspring. In any case, there will always
be a disturbance of the natural order.

4
Ath. Pol. 26.4; Plut. Per. 37.2–5.
5
Suda, eta, 536; Plut. de Mal. Her. 26; Diyllus, fr. 3; J. Wells, “Herodotus and
Athens,” CPh 23 (1928) 317–331.
6
Ar. Ach. 68–92, Av. 1124–138.
7
Arist. Gen. an., 2.7–8, is perhaps the fullest biological description of mules in
Greek texts. Ael. NA, 12.16, describes an origin story for the “first mule.”
 M ules in H erodotus : T he D estiny of H alf -B reeds 457
II. Successful Mules
Herodotus’ most famous mule figure is Cyrus, the child of a Me-
dian princess, Mandane, and a Persian nobleman, Cambyses, a member
of the persecuted Persian minority who lives in a Median-controlled
Empire (1.107). The first reference to Cyrus is in an oracle given
to Croesus, who was himself the doomed descendant of a marriage
between a legitimate queen, Candaules’ wife of the Heraclid dynasty,
and the lower-status nobleman Gyges, one of the Mermnadae (1.55.2).
While Gyges’ own reign and that of his immediate descendants were
successful, Croesus, his offspring in the seventh generation, suffers
for his ancestor’s crime of usurpation and regicide. When Croesus
asks the Delphic oracle whether he should attack the Persians, the
prophetess responds:
When the day comes that a mule (hemionos) should
become King of the Medes,
then, tender-footed Lydian, by pebbly Hermus flee
and do not remain,
nor think it shameful to be a coward (1.55.2)
Croesus dismisses this oracle, thinking it impossible that a quad-
ruped should ever become King, and proceeds in his doomed attack
upon Persia. By this time, Cyrus, a half-Mede, half-Persian child,
has grown to adulthood. He rebels against his murderous Median
grandfather with the help of a Persian army, successfully overthrow-
ing the Median dynasty and becoming the King of Kings himself.
Herodotus consistently portrays Cyrus as the greatest of Persian
monarchs; he also implies that Cyrus’ mixed heritage strengthens his
character. 8 Cyrus conquers many nations, but he treats them all with
compassion rather than oppressing them as the Medes did. His respect
for the words of his wise Lydian advisor Croesus marks him as a
good king in Herodotus’ tautology.9 Cyrus’ Persia is a paradigmatically
multi-ethnic empire that “readily adopts foreign nomoi” (1.125, 135).
Cyrus’ own initial status as a member of an ethnic minority gives him
awareness of the benefits and disadvantages of varied Persian, Median,
and Greek political and social practices. Since he is not burdened by
the weight of inherited tradition, he is free, for instance, to adopt the
Egyptian breastplate as superior to Persian armor and to promote the
Greek cultural practice of male-male erotic relationships (1.135).
Cyrus’ own son, Cambyses, however, is an insane and cruel ruler
who is overthrown by two treacherous magi. The short dynasty of
Cyrus ends in ignominy; all of its glory and strength is contained in
Cyrus himself. The oracle’s image of Cyrus as a mule is particularly
apt in this case: Cyrus is himself of mixed parentage and his own
child is flawed and sterile.

8
H. R. Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus (Cleveland 1966) 89–93,
161–67; H. C. Avery, “Herodotus’ Picture of Cyrus,” AJP 93 (1972) 529–31.
9
J. A. S. Evans, Herodotus, Explorer of the Past: Three Essays (Princeton
1991) 86–87.
458 A nise K. S trong
Herodotus’ narration of the origins of Cypselus, the tyrant of
Corinth, again reinforces his general theme of great leaders coming
from mixed marriages. No man from the ruling oligarchy of Corinth,
the Bacchiadae, was willing to marry Labda, the lame daughter of
Amphion, so she was married off to a lesser noble, Aetion, who was
of the Lapithae by descent (5.92). As in the case of Cyrus, an oracle
predicts the child’s greatness, and the Bacchiadae unsuccessfully plot
against the baby Cypselus just as Cyrus’ grandfather plotted against
him. Closely echoing Cyrus’ origin story, Cypselus grows up to
overthrow his maternal kin and set up a new dynasty of the Lapi-
thae. 10 While Cypselus, unlike Cyrus, is not portrayed as benevolent
or compassionate, he was a similarly successful revolutionary leader
who strengthened the city of Corinth. The human mules are not nec-
essarily gentle figures, but they are consistently tough and stubborn.
Like Cyrus’, Cypselus’ family died out in the second generation.
His grandson is brutally murdered after interfamilial strife, echoing
the Delphic oracle: “Fortunate he and his sons, but not the sons of
his sons” (5.92). These metaphorical mules themselves possess an ab-
normal share of good luck and success, but they are unable to pass it
onto their descendants, reflecting another Herodotean topos of mutable
fortunes and the dangers of monarchical rule.
When Darius, a later king of Persia, is laying siege to the rebel-
lious Babylonians, they defy him and prophesy that Darius will not
conquer Babylon “until mules sire offspring” (3.151.2). As with Croe-
sus’ oracle, this is initially dismissed as a paradox. Zopyrus, however,
a Persian advisor to Darius, takes the taunt seriously when one of his
own mules gives birth, an extremely rare but not biologically impos-
sible occurrence.11 In obedience to the omen, Zopyrus performs heroic
deeds that lead to the capture of Babylon. Darius hails Zopyrus himself
as the greatest “benefactor of his country” since Cyrus, “to whom none
of the Persians has ever dared to compare himself ” (3.160.1). Although
Zopyrus himself is not a mule or half-breed, he is associated with them
with regard to his own prodigious mule, as well as in the comparison
to Cyrus. The offspring of actual mules here predict triumph for Persia,
an emphatically heterogeneous empire whose rule expands and survives
despite the Persians’ assimilation of different cultures and ethnic groups.
Similarly, mules are associated with the successful revolution
of the sixth-century b . c . e . Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, who suppos-
edly savaged his own team of mules in a successful effort to present
himself as a target of assassination requiring an armed bodyguard as
self-defense against his enemies (1.59). 12 Peisistratus later used this

10
Vivienne Gray notes the very different portrayals of Cypselus and Cyrus and
Herodotus’ attitudes towards them, despite their similar origin stories: V. J. Gray,
“Herodotus and Images of Tyranny: The Tyrants of Corinth,” AJP 117 (1996) 366.
11
F. Eldridge and Y. Suzuki, “A Mare Mule—Dam or Foster Mother?” J. Hered.
67 (1976) 353–60.
12
Munson (above, n.1) 248–50, discusses these cases more, although she regards
mules and donkeys as functionally equivalent.
 M ules in H erodotus : T he D estiny of H alf -B reeds 459
bodyguard to overthrow the Athenian government and establish himself
as an autocratic tyrant. In Peisistratus’ and Zopyrus’ cases, there is
no direct mule-figure, but men who are associated with mules bring
about political and social change and overthrow former dynasties.

III. Dangers of Ethnically Mixed Children

Book 4 of the Histories, which focuses on the barbarian, exotic
Scythians, provides several examples of social intolerance and hostility
towards ethnically mixed children. The book begins with a story about
the importance of ethnic purity in Scythian society. For twenty-eight
years, the Scythian men had been invading upper Asia and destroy-
ing the power of the Medes, during the reigns of Cambyses and
Darius (4.1). In the meantime, the Scythian women back home had
sexual relations with their blind pastoral slaves, who were prisoners
of war. During the following decades, the women and slaves raised
a new generation to adulthood. According to Herodotus, when these
mixed-race children “understood their birth, they resolved to oppose
the return of the [original Scythians] from Media” (4.3). Just as in
Cyrus’ case, the children’s knowledge of their diverse origins leads
to a desire to rebel against their more powerful maternal relatives.
The original Scythian males persist in treating the rebels as slaves
rather than as half-Scythian children of their own free wives and go to
war against them. After initial setbacks, the Scythian warriors conclude,
So long as they see us with weapons, they will believe
themselves to be equal to us and born from equals
( ὅµοιοί τε καί ἐξ ὁµοίων ), but if they see us with
horsewhips rather than weapons, they will understand
that they are our slaves
(4.3.4)
Ultimately, this proves to be a successful tactic. When the Scyth-
ians use whips, as if the rebels were animals, the rebels “forgot that
they were soldiers” and ran away (4.4.1). In this anecdote, Herodotus
suggests that the new generation’s slave-fathers and their freeborn
mothers both have an important effect on their characters, although
the paternal legacy ultimately dominates. 13 While these young men
were raised as free citizens, they still instinctively respond to whips
and goads as slaves would. They are ἡµίονοι , mules, rather than
ὅµοιοί , equal men.
As befits their background, the rebels’ social identity is not inher-
ently fixed. The rebels initially act as free men and fight successfully;
it is only when the Scythians alter their practices and reshape their
own perceptions of the rebels that they can successfully redefine them
as “slaves.” This suggests that in fact the half-slave children do not
possess intrinsically submissive characters, although they are more

13
Munson (above, n.1) 76; A. B. Lloyd, Herodotus: Book II. Introduction (I)
and Commentary (II, III) (Leiden 1976) 310.
460 A nise K. S trong
susceptible to the imposition of slavery than sons of freeborn parents
might be. Carolyn Dewald notes that Hartog’s metaphorical mirror of
the Other is here used as an active weapon by the Scythians, who
reconfigure their wives’ children as slavish Others. 14
Any suggestion that these children are genetically rather than
“socially” subservient is contradicted by Herodotus’ numerous other
examples in which people adopt other nomoi (such as the later story
of Anacharsis, 4.76). Aristotle later argued that slavishness was an
inherent natural trait of certain ethnic groups rather than an assumed
nomos. 15 Herodotus, in contrast, offers a multitude of rags-to-riches
tales in which slaves or other subordinate groups seize power. Fur-
thermore, most Greek slaves in the early fifth century b . c . would
have been first-generation prisoners of war. 16 Munson suggests that
Herodotus represents freedom as a particularly Scythian value and
notes that the Scythians strongly distinguish between people who make
“good slaves,” like the “master-loving” Ionians, and “bad slaves,”
like the Scythians themselves (4.142). In other words, enslavement
can be forced upon any person or ethnic group, but, according to
the Scythians, certain cultural backgrounds produce more or less
submissive individuals.
When first describing the slave fathers of these rebellious offspring,
Herodotus mentions somewhat obliquely that their Scythian masters
blinded all their slaves. He explains the blind slaves are thus unable
to distinguish between the more desirable cream and the inferior
whey when performing their principal duty of churning mares’ milk
and therefore cannot steal the better product (4.2). 17 In other words,
the blind slaves are unable to distinguish properly between elite and
non-elite items; they then transgress by forming relationships with
the free Scythian wives. By mutilating and mistreating their slaves,
the metaphorical donkeys, the Scythians ultimately disrupt their own
system of social hierarchies by producing mule-children.
As opposed to the story of Cyrus, the interbreeding in the story
of the half-Scythian, half-slave children leads not to the production of
great heroes but to an eventual reversion to the path of the lower-status
parent. Although the mother is again the parent of higher status, here
the children ultimately follow not their elite maternal inheritance but
the slavish paternal behaviors. Echoing Cyrus, the ethnically mixed
offspring attempt a revolution, but in this case their coup fails. The
quality of the “ingredients” may be at stake. Herodotus emphasizes

14
C. Dewald, book review of Hartog (above, n.1) CPh 85 1988 217–24; Munson
(above, n.1) 111.
15
Arist. Pol 3.9.
16
R. K. Sinclair, Participation and Democracy in Athens, (Cambridge 1988) 9;
T. E. J. Wiedemann, (Slavery, Greece and Rome [Oxford 1987] 25) argues that inter-
nal reproduction of slaves became an increasingly important source in the later fifth
century, but the prisoners-of-war model seems more likely for the archaic setting of
this particular story.
17
Hartog (above, n.1) 18, 197.
 M ules in H erodotus : T he D estiny of H alf -B reeds 461
the positive virtues of the Medes, the lower-status half of Cyrus’
ancestry, whereas he tells us nothing about the origin of the blinded
Scythian prisoners of war (1.196). Mules were carefully bred in an-
tiquity from choice mares, such as those of the central Italian plains,
and the strongest of donkeys. While Herodotus may view the mixing
of two different types of noble blood as beneficial, the same is not
necessarily true for intermarriage between people of different social
as well as ethnic status.
Herodotus continues to associate the Scythians with odd and
problematic occurrences of interbreeding. The founder of a dynasty of
Scythian kings, Scythes, was supposedly the son of the Greek Heracles
and Echidne, a creature who was half-snake and half-woman—herself
a monstrous product of two species (4.8–10). Herodotus recounts the
story of this fantastic parentage as myth rather than history.
A later Scythian king, Scylas, was a son of the Scythian king
Ariapithes and a Greek woman from Istria who taught her child Greek
language and writing (4.78.2). Scylas found himself discontented with
Scythian ways and began to visit a Greek colony where he indulged
in Greek customs and worshiped Greek gods like Dionysus. According
to Herodotus, this was not because of his birth, but rather because
he had been educated in Greek customs (4.78.3). In contrast to the
earlier Scythian slaves, who ultimately behave as servile cowards
because of their upbringing by ex-slave fathers, Scylas becomes cul-
turally Greek due to his mother’s teachings. Eventually, his Scythian
subjects rebel against Scylas and murder him because of his foreign
customs, particularly his participation in the Bacchic revels.
Notably, Scylas did not attempt to bring change to his people.
Indeed, he rigidly separated the two halves of his heritage, asking
the Greeks of the town of Borysthenos to keep watch lest the Scyth-
ians spot him prancing around the agora in Greek costume on his
visits. Scylas goes so far in this cultural separation as to keep two
families, one Scythian and one Greek, each located in their own
city. Appropriately for a mule-figure, neither wife gave him a child
(4.78). Scylas passively accepts the xenophobia of the Scythians; he
does not try to bring change or introduce new nomoi to his subjects,
despite his own cultural alienation.
Herodotus emphasizes the dangers caused by ethnic intolerance by
pairing Scylas’ story with that of Anacharsis, a pure-blooded Scyth-
ian who is similarly punished for his fascination with Greek nomoi
(4.76–77). Anacharsis, a traveler and philosopher who was supposedly
the first metic to be offered Athenian citizenship, is killed by his
brother when he returns home because he has adopted the Eastern
cult of the Mother Goddess Cybele (4.76). 18 Although honored by
foreigners, he is despised at home for his love of foreign customs, and
the Scythians refuse to acknowledge his memory. Herodotus suggests
here that the Scythians are losing a wise man, the most valuable of

18
A. M. Armstrong, “Anacharsis the Scythian,” G&R 17 (1948) 18.
462 A nise K. S trong
resources in the Histories, because of their narrowness and cultural
self-centeredness. While Herodotus does argue that a person’s natal
nomoi should be paramount (e.g., 3.38), he mainly offers examples
of nomoi as formed by education and culture rather than blood. The
half-breed mule children are either uniquely blessed, with an ability
to choose the best nomoi for themselves, or uniquely cursed, unable
to fit in with either side of their heritage.
Herodotus twice emphasizes an odd logos about Scythia: there are
no mules bred within Scythian land (4.30.1 and 4.129.2). According to
Herodotus, to breed mules the Scythians have to drive their mares over
the Greek border in order to mate them with their neighbors’ donkeys.
Another common Herodotean motif of natural geographical and moral
borders is here linked with mules. 19 These animals are double mules,
the product of two different political as well as biological groups—the
Greek donkeys and the native Scythian mares. Herodotus links this
odd biological phenomenon to the cold and snow in Scythia, but he
fails to provide any satisfactory explanation for why this should affect
animal breeding (4.129.2). Apparently, Scythian insularity prevents even
animals from interbreeding within their territory.
Various other tales in Herodotus illustrate the fear of mixed
marriages and the disruptive potential of their offspring. In book 6,
the Pelasgians of Lemnos kidnap a number of Athenian women and
raise children by them. These Athenian women, like the mother of
Scylas, raise their sons to “behave like Athenians and speak Attic
Greek” (4.138.2). 20 As a consequence, these children believe that they
rule over and control all the other children ( ἄρχειν . . . ἐπεκράτεον ).
(By itself, this statement presents an intriguing reflection on what it
means to behave like an Athenian for an Ionian historian living dur-
ing the height of the Athenian empire.) The adult Pelasgian males,
meanwhile, respond to their sons’ arrogance by murdering all the
half-breeds and their Athenian mothers, thereby preventing the de-
velopment of a Cyrus or Cypselus. For their crime, the Pelasgians’
crops fail and their birthrate declines, both in human children and
in cattle, demonstrating the favor that the gods of Herodotus have
towards mixed marriages.
Preemptive execution of half-breeds or unease about mixed mar-
riages occurs several times in Herodotus, suggesting that this was a
common fear among ancient Greeks. For his refusal to sleep with his
wife from a rival political family, the Alcmaeonidae, the Athenian
tyrant Peisistratus incurs the enmity of that family and faces a revolt
(1.61). Herodotus attributes Ionian women’s centuries of domestic
seclusion to an original forced intermarriage between Greek men
and Carian girls (1.146.), which left lingering bitterness and distrust
among Ionian women.

19
Munson (above, n.1) 11; D. Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus
(Toronto 1989) 126–44.
20
γλῶσσάν τε τὴν Ἀττικὴν καὶ τρόπους τοὺς Ἀθηναίων ἐδίδασκον τοὺς παῖδας .
 M ules in H erodotus : T he D estiny of H alf -B reeds 463
The insular, xenophobic state of Sparta faces particular repeated
difficulties in the Histories due to the ruling class’s emphasis on
the purity of Spartan blood and the importance of the royal dynasty.
Treachery against the Spartan government first occurs due to intermar-
riage between Spartan women and neighboring Minyan men. When the
Spartan leaders are about to execute some rebellious Minyan leaders,
their ethnically Spartan wives enter into the prison and sneak their
husbands out dressed in Spartan women’s clothing. Although the
Spartan nobles had not expected any treachery from their daughters
and nieces, the women’s loyalty proves to be to their husbands and
new families rather than to their natal kin, suggesting the danger of
exogamous marriage (4.146).
Later discord arises when the wise and gifted Spartan king De-
maratos is forced into exile because he is alleged to be not the king’s
heir but the illegitimate son of the queen and the palace donkey-keeper
(6.68) Such an association with donkeys marks him as another mule-
figure, even if both parents are technically full Spartans. Although
Demaratos’ mother claims to have been impregnated by a divine spirit
rather than a lowly donkey-keeper, the other noble Spartans condemn
the king and Demaratos flees across the Aegean. In Persia, the gener-
ous King Darius “receives him in great style and gives him land and
cities” (6.70). While Herodotus does not render a definitive judgment
on the actual parentage of Demaratos, he makes it clear that Sparta
is losing a great ruler through paranoid narrowness, whereas Darius
gains a gifted subordinate due to Persia’s greater cultural tolerance
and appreciation for talent regardless of ethnicity.

IV. Conclusion
Half-breed children and wives who had intermarried were fun-
damentally people whose loyalty toward their own family could no
longer be completely trusted. In some cases, this has good results
for a state. Cyrus and Cypselus, because they have no loyalty to the
ruling ethnic groups, are able to overthrow them and bring about new
eras of more just rule. In other cases, the mere suspicion of such po-
tential disloyalty leads to the death of the children and their mothers.
Several trends repeat themselves in these various stories of ethnic
intermingling and mixed-race children. The mothers’ blood is generally
the dominant factor in determining both social status and emotional
ties: Greek women educate their children to be Greeks, and Cyrus and
Cypselus are able to become rulers despite the lowly rank of their
fathers. This again reflects the metaphor of the mule: mules are the
offspring of a noble, elegant mare and a crude, male donkey. As with
mules, the product of this interbreeding is often greater than the sum
of its individual parts: Cyrus is a far greater king than the Medes
had previously produced, just as mules are stronger and hardier than
either donkeys or horses.
Yet despite the extraordinary talents of many of the mule-fig-
ures, their lines are fundamentally doomed to die out in the second
464 A nise K. S trong
generation, if not before. Mules are sterile, except in rare miracu-
lous cases, and thus the fortune and talent is funneled into a single
man and his son, rather than a long, moderately successful dynasty.
Herodotus uses these cases of extraordinary fortune to illustrate his
thesis of fate’s unreliability. It also casts doubt on the inherent virtue
of monarchy as a political system, since great men’s talents do not
pass reliably to their children, and therefore on the entire Persian
system of government. Herodotus frequently relates stories of wicked
and incompetent Persian kings, such as the sacrilegious Cambyses,
who inherit from their wise and benevolent fathers to the detriment
of their nations. 21
This focus and concern on intermarriage may also be related to
the fifth-century Athenian laws restricting citizenship to the legitimate
children of two Athenian citizens. As a non-Athenian citizen who was
nevertheless very familiar with Athenian history and laws, Herodo-
tus would have been keenly aware of this law and of the numerous
social ramifications resulting from it. The marriage restrictions form
a frequent subject of Athenian New Comedy, as well as fifth- and
fourth-century court cases. 22 By emphasizing the role of maternal
education, Herodotus argues that nomoi can be taught and that anyone
can become Athenian, just as Anacharsis adopted Greek culture and
gained Athenian citizenship in an earlier semi-mythical era. In his
tales of miraculous mule-foals and extraordinary half-breed children,
Herodotus hints that the ability of metics to contribute meaningfully
to the Athenian polis should not be discounted. If Herodotus did
indeed live briefly in Athens and then leave for the new colony of
Thurii, his discontent at second-class-citizen status may be reflected
in this celebration of mixed-ethnicity figures. 23
Finally, Herodotus implies that the Athenian anxiety over pure-
bred children may ultimately hurt the polis, just as the Pelasgians
of Lemnos were ruined after they killed their half-Athenian children.
Herodotus places the tale of murdered Pelasgian half-breeds directly
before his account of the Second Persian War and the destruction of
Athens itself. Such a location gives this anecdote a high degree of
prominence within the narrative. Meanwhile, the people most afraid
of interbreeding are the Scythians, Herodotus’ paradigm of barbarism.
By glorifying the lowly mule, Herodotus argues that a mixture of
cultures and ethnic backgrounds is the key to achieving true civiliza-
tion and strong, effective leadership.

Stanford University ANISE K. STRONG

Classical World 103.4 (2010) akstrong@stanford.edu

21
E.g. Hdt. 3.2–4, 10–37.
22
D. Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic (Cambridge 1977) 70.
23
Suda, eta, 536; Wells, 318.